SPEAKER_00: Well, today is uh Trinity Sunday, and uh this is going to mark really the beginning of what will be uh ordinary time where we're gonna be counting our days uh leading up to All Saints in the fall.
SPEAKER_00: But Trinity Sunday is really the day when the church takes like an intentional step back, like a backward step and a bird's eye view, and gets explicit about what is constantly always on our lips for the remainder of the year, namely Father, Son, and Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: But it's a way of taking a step back and being explicit about Father, Son, and Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Explicit about Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: The doctrine of the Trinity is peculiar to the Christian faith, right?
SPEAKER_00: So no other philosophical or religious tradition has anything like Trinity to explain the divine, to talk about God.
SPEAKER_00: It's peculiar to Christians.
SPEAKER_00: And in the church, it's considered actually dogma.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we may hear often words like dogmatic.
SPEAKER_00: Um, typically we use that in a negative connotation, somebody's being dogmatic.
SPEAKER_00: But in the church, uh dogma is actually a beautiful thing.
SPEAKER_00: And it refers to the doctrines that are non-negotiable.
SPEAKER_00: Uh the doctrine of the Trinity is non-negotiable.
SPEAKER_00: And what that means is that when you begin taking apart the grammar of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity, that as you're doing that, at the same time, you're actually stepping outside of what we mean by the language of Christian or orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_00: You're you're going into something else and you're uh steering from what is historically the Orthodox understanding of the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I sit make that comment not to say uh sort of a, you know, let's circle the wagons and how dare folks, you know, do this.
SPEAKER_00: That's not why I'm making this comment of dogma and the necessity of Trinity, but rather uh to show the absolute uh importance, the fundamental nature, the essential need of the doctrine of the Trinity for making our lives make any kind of sense at all.
SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by this, if we understand doctrines in the church, these ways of talking, this is often how I think about that that doctrines have a certain grammar and a certain syntax, a certain formula, a way of, you know, justified by faith through grace, or uh the doctrine as we speak of the person of Christ, of two natures in the hypostatic union of one person.
SPEAKER_00: It gives us this language that we can talk about, aspects of our faith.
SPEAKER_00: But doctrine, we might think of it as a pillar or a column, like this vertical, and the horizontal beam on top of these uh vertical columns that we can say doctrine or dogma are, that the beam is the story of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: This is the story of the Bible, the story of Jesus, the narrative, the drama as it's unfolding.
SPEAKER_00: And doctrines are those uh systems of belief that hold up the story, that the doctrine of Christology, of the doctrine of humanity, the doctrine of the Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: That is, that if you don't have these pillars or these doctrines, that the story actually doesn't make any sense or it falls apart.
SPEAKER_00: So what essentially happens with Jesus, the advent and the revelation of God in Jesus, that Jesus, the the means by which the full revelation of God was revealed, that the advent, the death and resurrection of Christ actually occasioned a moment with God's people that said, huh, our language about God is outmoded, outdated.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't actually work.
SPEAKER_00: It's not going uh the distance here.
SPEAKER_00: They recognize that if we are to continue with the claims that we're making about God as creator, about God as redeemer in Christ, about the humanity of Christ, about the indwelling of the Spirit, that we actually need a way of articulating that.
SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, the word Trinity is not in the Bible, but the reality of Trinity, that is Father, Son, and Spirit, is in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: The Trinity is just the word that the church uses to give description to that which has been revealed.
SPEAKER_00: But what essentially happened was the church recognized that in order to make sense of our life, in order to make sense of the drama that's been unfolded in Christ, of Christ's redemption and the hope that we have, that Father, Son, and Spirit, that the doctrine of the Trinity was of absolute necessity.
SPEAKER_00: So it's born out of this deep desire to see this drama keep on going.
SPEAKER_00: And so the story of Jesus, the story of the Bible, and the intermingling, the interwovenness of our story with that story is all held together by the glue that we call Father, Son, and Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: What does this mean?
SPEAKER_00: You'll notice in just a few moments when we recite what we do every Sunday, uh, the Nicene Creed.
SPEAKER_00: In the Nicene Creed, there's three stanzas, there's three sections.
SPEAKER_00: It's actually a creed about the Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: I believe God the Father, right?
SPEAKER_00: I believe Jesus Christ the Son.
SPEAKER_00: I believe in the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Those are the main three sections, right, of the creed.
SPEAKER_00: It's a Trinitarian creed.
SPEAKER_00: It's a creed of making claims about God.
SPEAKER_00: And all the descriptions that fit, if you'll notice the next time you open up your prayer book, right, that the claims that we make about us, about the church, about our sanctity, our unity, our common life, about forgiveness, about our hope in the future, you'll notice that that is all bracketed under our claims about the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: So, what does this mean?
SPEAKER_00: This is what we're seeing in the necessity of the uh this doctrine of the Trinity reflecting the living God who's revealed by Jesus to make any kind of sense of the story.
SPEAKER_00: And you can see a loose story in the creeds, right?
SPEAKER_00: From creation, redemption in Christ, and then you see the kingdom that we're hoping for and the resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: But what does this mean for us as Christians?
SPEAKER_00: This means that the reality of forgiveness, to doubt the durability of forgiveness, is to doubt the Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: To doubt your sanctity right now, the sanctity that belongs to the church, that belongs to the body of Christ, in the logic of the creeds is to doubt the Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: What you see is that the interwovenness of the claims that we make about God are interwoven with claims that we make about ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, good theology is making claims about God.
SPEAKER_00: But what we find as we're making these claims is that those claims make a claim on us.
SPEAKER_00: That this is the God who's been revealed.
SPEAKER_00: This is how I know mercy follows me everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: This is the God who's been revealed in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This is how I know that I'm blameless and righteous and sanctified.
SPEAKER_00: This is the God revealed in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: This is how I know that I have any kind of grounds for hope about the future.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because it's this God that's been revealed.
SPEAKER_00: What we often do is we kind of disconnect or unhook these radical claims about God from ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: This is why I love the scripture that was uh uh we beautifully read in Genesis, right?
SPEAKER_00: Or let us make humanity in our image.
SPEAKER_00: That this already, this vision of Trinity at the very beginning, well, how do you know what a human being is?
SPEAKER_00: Well, you gotta look to God, right?
SPEAKER_00: This connection between Father, Son, and Spirit, and who we really are.
SPEAKER_00: We see it in our Matthew text that even with redemption, right, Jesus says, all power and authority has been given to me.
SPEAKER_00: Go baptize, make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: It's like your creation is from, yes, Father, Son, Spirit, your redemption is from, yes, Father, Son, and Spirit, and our future, as we say in the creeds.
SPEAKER_00: It's Father, Son, Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: So, Trinity, to make claims about this God, to make claims about the redemption that Jesus has brought to us, is to make claims about Father, Son, and Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And what this means, right, it's it's like the the church is wrestling like, wow, like this God who's revealed is the Father of Jesus, who is the creator of everything, transcendent beyond everything, and yet intimately involved in humanity, and the person of the Son is actually in union, perfect union with humanity.
SPEAKER_00: And then ascended this divine human Christ ascended and is seated in the heavenly places, ruling, and yet this king of the universe is yet also intimately present in our heart by the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: This is wild.
SPEAKER_00: This is Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: This is Father, Son, and Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: I love, I remember, I can't remember the preacher who said it, but I thought, like, that's exactly right.
SPEAKER_00: Uh when Christ dies, right, in the temple veil that separates the holy place from the Holy of Holies is opened.
SPEAKER_00: Uh that, oh right, we can now go into the Holy of Holies, right?
SPEAKER_00: That this is this image, and of course, that's yeah, that's absolutely there.
SPEAKER_00: We see this, I think, in Hebrews.
SPEAKER_00: But this preacher, uh, he said, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: When that veil tore, it's like God is out on the run.
SPEAKER_00: Like this wild God is searching.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think it was Spurgeon that called him the hound of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Like he will hunt you down.
SPEAKER_00: This is Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: This is the God who's been revealed.
SPEAKER_00: The creator, the redeemer, and the one who is not out there somewhere, but here that we call Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: As it was in the beginning, it is right now, and it will be forever and ever.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.